Now that Umbraco 5.0 is out there
(with about 5000 downloads - thanks
everyone!), we've worked on a small side-project to help
us push forward over the coming months.
Our issue
tracker for Umbraco 5, which we launched in December, is
proving to be a popular hub of information and we're using it to
not only keep a record of what issues people have found and fixed,
but also which ones are being worked on, and their target release
version.
Since this data is all in one place, Matt, Warren and I decided
to build a really simple aggregation of some of that data in a form
that we hope is easier to scan-read than going through YouTrack
directly.
We've put up an early version at http://progress.umbraco.org/ for you to take a
look at.
It's organised by "version" and takes information from the "Due
in build" field inside YouTrack, and presents the assigned issues
categorised by "Not Started", "In Progress" and "Completed" with a
quick progress bar to give you an idea.
Not every issue in YouTrack is yet assigned to a particular
release, and of course some issues will be left until future
releases in the spirit of getting releases out early and often, so
they might not show up on this page - but it's a great excuse to
make your voice heard directly in YouTrack in
the comments and votes for items that are important to you.
Next steps
We'd like to be able to use this information to help people
gauge when an item is slated for inclusion in an upcoming update
(be that a minor bug-fixing release, or one that contains new
features).
Another big source of potential is that it could progress into a
great tool that helps the many folks out there that would love to
get involved on the Core team and start issuing pull requests, but
aren't sure which items need focus.
This is preparing the ground for us to be able to put together
some documentation not only for Umbraco 5 itself, but also some
guides for contributing code to the core - and other pages like
this that help people know what needs focus and when.
It's not just the Core that's open source
We think it'd be pretty cool to get the code for this up on a
repository somewhere, and if people want to issue pull requests to
add features or add a bit of style to even our Progress page, then
awesome. We just need to jump through a couple of TeamCity hoops
first, and I'll plug the code repository when that's done by
updating this post and shouting out on Twitter.
Enjoy!